New Leaf

In New Leaf, a celebratory collection by Seán Lysaght, we find a poet querying the limits of his adopted place with new experiences, either through the literal displacement of travel or in changing patterns of friendship and affection. The author’s distinctive recordings of the natural world are abundantly clear — ‘Willow warbler still wavers / down the ladder of summer / on its song, my anthem.’ But from ‘Bog Song’, ‘Brockagh’ (‘badger wood’) and Inishmaan, through a Tuscan sketchbook to Abu Dhabi, cultural contrasts assert themselves — there is ‘mall music to soothe a distracted soul’ and ‘signatures of thrift and making do / before oil revenues changed the Emirates’. The voice of these poems is realized in suitably shifting modes of utterance so that a given life becomes at times almost allegorical. Seán Lysaght’s lightness of touch combines with a delicately tuned note of self-questioning to make New Leaf a book of mature assurance.